Place only your kindest thoughts on everything you experience today. Meet yourself.
Superior music is purity itself; it clears the air.
What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.
It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner. . . I felt that I had suddenly acquired value to myself, to my family, and to the world.
The Girl of the Period, sauntering before one down Broadway, is one panorama of awful surprises from top to toe. Her clothes characterize her. She never characterizes her clothes. She is upholstered, not ornamented. She is bundled, not draped. She is puckered, not folded. She struts, she does not sweep. She has not one of the attributes of nature nor of proper art. She neither soothes the eye like a flower, nor pleases it like a picture. She wearies it like a kaleidoscope. She is a meaningless dazzle of broken effects.
Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?
The literary artist will. . . portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.
There is no business, no avocation, whatever, which will not permit a man, who has the inclination, to give a little time, every day, to study.
I have a need to play intensely every day, to fight every match hard.
Many yet are the secret truths of God which will be unfolded as they are needed.
Barry recounts all this in prose of often startling beauty. Just as he describes people stopping in the street to look at Roseanne, so I often found myself stopping to look at the sentences he gave her, wanting to pause and copy them down.